Christmas Sweater update

I'm starting to wonder if there should be this many bad thoughts knit into a sweater. I thought that I'd finished this sweater in September and all I had left was the seams and finding the perfect buttons. Since I didn't have the perfect buttons, hate seaming, and had a new sweater waiting I put the pieces in the stash and decided to deal with it later. At the beginning of November I was in a knit shop and found the perfect buttons.

Once I got home I put in the shoulder seams for the sweater and started working the button band. I carefully figured out the placement of the buttons and sewed them on. Then I worked the collar and came down the other side and began making holes. Things were working out great until I approached the bottom of the sweater and noticed my sweater looked like this.

Having watched Pooh when I was younger I knew that Piglets sweater unraveled from the bottom in the Blustery Day scene. I also remembered last year the Yarn Harlot made a similar mistake and unraveled the piece from the bottom rather than undoing the button band, collar, shoulder seam, and 10+inches of knitting. I have enough yarn left over and enough time that if I messed up horribly I could just redo it so I poured a drink and unknotted the end. I waited for the whole thing to unravel like Piglet's sweater. It didn't.

There was a ray of hope in a loose yarn tail that I could pull out stitch by stitch. It was very slow going, but was faster than having to reknit the entire piece. After I got past the ribbing the yarn unraveled like a normal piece of knitting does. When I had frogged to the point where the ribbing stopped on the other side I put the stitches back on my needle, knit the ribbing, and cast off. 

The way this sweater is going I was terrified that there would be some horrible mistake with the sleeves, but those went in smoothly and the sweater is now finished. After Christmas I'll share pictures of the completed sweater. 

(In my research of this technique I learned that the stitches will all be moved half a stitch over so if you're doing something like ribbing you need to undo to the beginning of the ribbing or work a row of decorative stitches to hide the wonkiness.)